Macro virus for Staroffice discovered

Researchers have detected the first virus affecting StarOffice although, so far, it hasn't been used to infect computers.

Since the virus has not been launched with malicious intent yet, a teenager hacker may have written it, said Roel Schouwenberg, senior research engineer for Kaspersky Lab. The virus uses macros to attack the office suite from Sun Microsystems.

Kaspersky is calling the virus "Stardust." Viruses using macros are rarely seen anymore since simply shutting off a program's macro feature stops them, Schouwenberg said. Macros can be used to automate certain tasks within a document, such as a repeated calculations on a spreadsheet.

Macro viruses were most often written to disrupt Microsoft office applications, Kaspersky wrote on its virus blog.

Typically, a virus using macros infects a template, which is then read when opening other documents and infects those also, Schouwenberg said. The Stardust virus is contained in a StarOffice document that uses macros and then infects a global template.

If a user opens a document infected with Stardust, every StarOffice text document, with a ".sxw" extension, or document template, with a ".stw" extension, will be infected, Schouwenberg said.